On occasion, simple tasks that should only take a few minutes end up taking hours. There are plenty of operating system (OS) evangelists and fan boys out there, but when it comes down to it, each one has its quirks and annoyances. Cases in point, a simple program uninstall issue on my laptop running Windows 7 the other day. Now, I’ve had my share of install and uninstall problems over the years. Many of them can be fixed in one of the following ways: Re-install the program into the same location, hoping it will fix any path issues or corrupt installer information. Or, re-install the windows installer hoping that it will fix any installer related issues. Then there are plenty of Knowledge Base (KB) article out there curtsy of Microsoft, that one cat utilize. Well, as it happened, none of the above solutions seemed to do the trick for me. Instead, I was continuously getting an “Error 1606: Could Not Access Network Location” message. Conveniently, the actual network location which could not be accessed was not shown. The interesting thing was that I could not re-install the program either, because Windows was giving me the exact same error. A quick search around the web brought up the following KB886549, which while describing the symptoms precisely, in terms of an effective solution did little to alleviate the problem. I double and tripled checked my registry entries, modified paths as suggested in the KB, but all of it was to no avail, and actually cause some strange OS behavior at times. Then, after several hours of reading through countless forum posts that often times were only remotely related to my problem, I puzzled together the following solution that did the trick. Progress at your own peril:
- Backup your system and registry, and note the installation directory of the application you are trying to uninstall
- Open the windows registry with your favorite registry editor
- Locate: My Computer > HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT > Installer > Products
- Locate the sub-folder for which the ProductName corresponds to the application name you are trying to uninstall
- Delete that sub-folder and re-start your system
- Re-install the application in the same location as before
- You now should be able to uninstall the application normally
Hopefully, the instructions above will save some of you experiencing similar issues a significant amount of time. Good luck!
